Exciting TaskPaper news, plus need some feedback

Posted June 20, 2008 by jesse

I'm excited to report that I've just begun a collaboration with Young Hoo of www.taskodone.com. Who knew, last month when I was in Korea we probably road on the train together, wish we'd started the collaboration just a little sooner so we could have met up!

For a while now I've been wondering how to get TaskPaper documents onto the iPhone. Synching to iCal todo's wasn't a great solution, to make it work I would have needed to add a bunch of tags with metadata to each entry. A much better solution seemed to be to embrace the plain text nature of TaskPaper documents, and just synch them up to a wiki "style" website. That way the documents would be in the "cloud" and easily accessible to any device either through the web browser, or a native client.

The problem is that I don't really want to get into managing servers and I'm not that experience of a web developer. Oh, and I have no time!!! These issues all pushed this idea into the background.

But with the beta launch of Googles App Engine things began to look much more possible. That service allows developers like me to write web applications, but leaves all the grunt work of maintaining servers and scaling up to google. So that got me excited, and I started really thinking about the project, but I still had no time.

Then I started thinking about taskodone.com, feature wise it had almost everything that I wanted. A way to view TaskPaper documents on the web, and an API for reading/writing them from a client app. So I contacted Young Hoo, and we've talking about the idea ever since. It's working out to be a great fit. Taskodone.com is already written in python (programming language required for google app engine) and Young Hoo, isn't just messing around with python, he really knows what he's doing!!! So the initial port to google app engine is going well, we'll post a link for people to try out once we have things a bit more working.

In the meantime we would love to get a bit more feedback from everyone about how they would like to see this project develop over the next few months. Here's what we plan to be doing:

  • Move www.taskodone.com's functionality to www.taskpaper.com's and host it on google app engine. (among other things this will also allow you to just sing in using your google account)
  • Add support to TaskPaper.app for browsing, loading, and saving documents into the cloud on www.taskpaper.com.
  • Rebrand taskodone as a TaskPaper site.
  • Update the site to match TaskPaper's minimal aesthetic. There are already a lot of great sites for managing tasks such as http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ and http://www.tadalist.com/. Our goal will be to provide the more minimal/hackable (in the good way :)) solution, in the same way that TaskPaper positions itself against OmniFocus and Things.

Before we get to deep into our own ideas about the project I'd love to hear what everyone else thinks, and what you would want from such a service. How it should work. The basics (save your documents to the site and read them) will be free, but we'd also like to add some paid features. Any and all thoughts and suggestions are welcome.

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kimonostereo - June 20, 2008 12:57 PM

I've been using taskodone off and on and while it worked well, it was frustrating to use on the iPhone sometimes because it's just not really formatted as an iPhone web app the way something like Hahlo.com is for example.

I for one would LOVE to see this kind of syncing for taskpaper docs on the go. I think basic upload and syncing within taskpaper would be my first request, then a very iPhone like web interface or at least iPhone / Mobile Safari detection so that folks with iPhones get a nice interface to work in.

Can't wait to see whats next!

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ClintMacD - June 20, 2008 1:10 PM

…frustrating to use on the iPhone sometimes because it's just not really formatted as an iPhone web app…

Agreed (I played with it for a few minutes just now, after not looking at it for several months: nice in desktop Safari, not formatted right for Mobile Safari; too much wide, not enough long). But I think there are plenty of iPhone Web app resources for Jesse and Young Hoo to learn from (including many on Apple’s Developer site).

Best wishes, Clint

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ClintMacD - June 20, 2008 12:59 PM

Then I started thinking about taskodone.com, feature wise it had almost everything that I wanted. A way to view TaskPaper documents on the web, and an API for reading/writing them from a client app…

Sounds GREAT!

By the way, a better URL seems to be:

http://taskodone.com/

Taskodone/TaskPaper would appear to be a wonderful solution to the “multiple computers” problem, where I want to edit the same TaskPaper document from work, from home, or from a public computer in a coffee shop (be sure that security is handled correctly). Nice.

It is even a partial solution to the iPhone issue, since it will allow visiting and editing TaskPaper lists from anywhere with Internet access. However, we aren’t going to let you completely off the hook for this one: eventually, TaskPaper will cry out for a full-fledged iPhone client (hey, nowhere can I brainstorm and “TaskPaperize” better than on an airplane without Internet access :-) ).

Best wishes, Clint

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jesse - June 20, 2008 1:58 PM

However, we aren’t going to let you completely off the hook for this one: eventually, TaskPaper will cry out for a full-fledged iPhone client (hey, nowhere can I brainstorm and “TaskPaperize” better than on an airplane without Internet access :-) )

Yeah I'd like that too... but I think this website is a perquisite. Because the native client needs a way to get things off the phone and into the cloud.

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Nick Brawne - June 20, 2008 2:46 PM

What about using SproutCore (http://www.sproutcore.com/) Apple's new web app framework and Mobile(Me) for syncing ?

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jesse - June 20, 2008 3:01 PM

SproutCore looks interesting, but I my little web development experience is all on the server side with a ruby rails app. I don't actually know any javascript. So I'll leave that decision to Young Hoo. As far as Mobile(me) I'm not sure if that would work as well. My impression is that it would work fine for synching the data, but it has a number of problems.

  • Requires a mac account which is relatively costly.
  • If we synch the file to Mobile(me) I don't think we would have anyway to "present" it on the web. Since we wouldn't have any control of the server software there wouldn't be any way to provide a nice web interface that's customized for viewing and editing TaskPaper files.

Because of this I really think that a separate web site is a better solution. Last you'll still be able to synch with Mobile(me) via iDisk, but again, that won't give you the ability to view and edit the files over the web when you are not on a Mac with iDisk support.

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Fernando Lins - June 20, 2008 3:13 PM

I really like that there will be TaskPaper support for iPhone/iTouch with ability to sync the lists and so on. However, the fact that this is an online feature got me worried, will we have some way to edit the tasks on the iPhone/iTouch while offline and then sync them later when online? I work in some places that don't have wi-fi access, and I usually take the time I have while in the subway to organize my stuff, so that would be the must-have feature for me, and many other users I believe. I know that Google itself provides a framework that allows web-apps to save work offline, but so far it is only supported by a Firefox extension.

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jesse - June 20, 2008 3:21 PM

I'm not sure at this point, but I think getting the website working is a prerequisite to any offline solutions. A theoretical native iPhone client would solve your problem since it would be able to store the data locally and just synch when network access was available. For the pure web interface I'm less sure.

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Nick Brawne - June 20, 2008 4:04 PM

Could you do an iPhone app version of TP ? My undestanding is that programing for the phone is similar to programing for the desktop.

That way you would cover all the options:

  • Mac version
  • web version
  • mobile version

Think of all the bundle app / service option prices you could generate with all three. Buy the Mac and Mobile version and you get free access to the Pro features of the web app. Buy the desktop versions and you get 50% off the mobile version etc . . . .

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jesse - June 20, 2008 4:30 PM

Could you do an iPhone app version of TP

It's certainly on my list. But first I need to get TaskPaper done. Then we need to get the website and synch working. Then the iPhone... and that's a bit to far away to make a good predication on. Right now I'm trying to convince a friend to work on a native iPhone app, and they are, but it's to early at this point to tell if/when it will get completed.

Just so people don't think I've forgotten about TaskPaper, I just got a pretty cool feature working. You can now click on tags (well in my dev version) to start a tag search. Well that was old news, could do that in 1.0 too. But now you can also click on tag values, that that will do a search for entries that have both the same tag and value. And I also learned (well someone actually just told me) how to build predicates that do that search. So once I build the UI for it (still a bit of work) you'll be able to do searches such as has tag @priority with value greater then 2.

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Matthew Crider - June 20, 2008 5:15 PM

Just so people don't think I've forgotten about TaskPaper..... Whew! I was going to say, "Hey, don't forget about us!" :-)

you'll be able to do searches such as has tag @priority with value greater then 2.

That is absolutely awesome! I cannot wait.

Matt

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Samuel - June 29, 2008 7:33 PM

I hope Tasko stays free! If this newly launched site has a monthly fee, please keep the old site up.

Thanks.

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jesse - June 30, 2008 7:27 AM

All the features of Taskodone.com will continue to be free. Eventually Young Hoo was planning to add some paid features to taskodone.com, he'll just be adding those to taskpaper.com instead. The organization here is that Young Hoo is still in charge, though collaborating with me, he's just moving his stuff to taskpaper.com. The idea is that using the TaskPaper brand will make it easier for me to drive traffic to his site, and it will also make TaskPaper.app more popular since it will have an integrated online service.

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John Zeratsky - July 1, 2008 11:23 AM

This is very exciting, Jesse. I'm glad to hear about your plans.

My only feature request is: Support actual syncing, not just "browsing, loading, and saving documents into the cloud." It should basically work like magic :-) — if I make changes locally, they automatically show up on TaskPaper.com, and if I make changes online, they automatically show up locally.

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jesse - July 1, 2008 12:21 PM

A really cool "magic" solution for synching is explained here. It's for synching to taskodone.com, which is actually the basis for the site that is going to become taskpaper.com.

The one problem with any offline synching solution is that eventually we need a way to let the user deal with merges and conflicts. I can imagine doing this with a nice user friendly file diff viewer, but writing that is a bit of a job.

So we are still thinking on this... ideas very welcome. Because of the difficulties provides by offline synching I am thinking of modeling TaskPaper's built in support to work like editing a wiki page on a website. The idea being that you open a "remote" document. And when you save it saves immediatly to the site of the document version numbers match. If they do not match then it ask you if you want to overwrite the existing. If network connection goes down it tells you and you get the option to save the file locally. In many ways this isn't as nice as the syncing solution linked to above (and no matter what solution TaskPaper build in, the above technique should still work), but it does skip over the while merge and conflics cases.

Can anyone think of a way to make the above linked solution user friendly for non technical users. And also safe so that the user doesn't accidentally overwrite their data when they edit from multiple computers, or from a single computer and the web?

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